On the BinaryTides.com site there's a recent post for those familiar with Javascript and wanting to have the same kind of object-style literals in PHP.

As similar thing [to Javascript object literals] can be done in PHP using anonymous functions (since 5.3) [...] Since version 5.3 Php added support for closures and that feature has been used above to create javascript style object literals. The use(&$a) expression makes the variable $a available inside the function happy.

Code snippets are included showing how to create these objects via the use of closures and a little trickery with call_user_func_array and __call to make assigning properties easier.

Rob Allen has shared some of his personal experience in how much faster PHP 5.3 is over the latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series when he tried to change up some view helpers in his Zend Framework application.

I was looking at the way view helpers work in ZF2 and thought it would be more convenient if we altered the syntax a little. A side-effect of the change was that we'd have to use call_user_func_array, which is perceived as slow. I thought I'd whip up a simple test to find out how much slower it would be over a direct method call.

He includes the sample code he used to benchmark the request times between the two versions measured by microtime. In his results he saw a difference of almost five seconds between the same code running on 5.3 versus 5.2 (according to test runs on his laptop).